International team demonstrates a human crew drilling on Mars to search for habitable environments and life

A crew consisting of biologists, geologists and engineers from America, Australia, Peru, England, and Portugal deployed to a simulated Mars surface habitat in Southern Utah to perform a simulation of a human mission to Mars to look for life using state of the art drilling technology to acquire unaltered subsurface samples.The team used the MARTE drill, a prototype of a Mars drill capable of 10 m depth continuous core samples.Drilling was accomplished into sandstone rock that was identified based on geological field work as a fossil soil containing root casts and insect burrows created 150 M years ago. The MARTE drill acquired 63 cm of core with 90% recovery using aseptic technique.Core recovered was immediately transported to the Habitat and the field teamimmediately analyzed samples in the Habitat/ laboratory for mineralogy using a Terra XRD instrument, prototype of the MSL Chemin, for total organic content using chemical oxidation, and for presence of modern biology using Polymerase Chain reaction analysis.